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Fish 4.0.0 by SteveHawk27

Fish 4.0.0 by SteveHawk27

5 Comments

  • Post Author
    abound
    Posted February 27, 2025 at 1:17 pm

    The most interesting thing about Fish 4.0.0 for most people will be that it is now written in Rust, which they talk about here [1]. Looking forward to testing it out and seeing if there are any noticeable differences.

    [1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512

  • Post Author
    nindalf
    Posted February 27, 2025 at 1:20 pm

    Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus (https://fishshell.com/blog/rustport/) is the full story of their rewrite from C++ to Rust.

    Discussed on HN here – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535217 (906 points, 198 comments).

    Highlights of the rewrite

    – 1155 files changed, 110247 insertions(+), 88941 deletions(-) (excluding translations)

    – 2604 commits by over 200 authors

    – 498 issues

    – Almost 2 years of work

    – 57K Lines of C++ to 75K Lines of Rust 5 (plus 400 lines of C 6)

    – C++–

  • Post Author
    oersted
    Posted February 27, 2025 at 1:23 pm

    I've used Fish for many years, but frankly only for the great autocompletion. The streamlined theme/prompt system and oh-my-fish plugin management are quite nice too, but minor.

    The rest of Fish features that are not bash-compatible are rather a pain, particularly environment variable management. In principle these features have a better design than in bash, but not that much better, and their use is infrequent enough to have to re-learn them every time. Unfortunately, they just end up being a minor inconvenience when you try to copy-paste setup instructions from docs, and I don't interact with these features otherwise.

  • Post Author
    guytv
    Posted February 27, 2025 at 1:25 pm

    Can someone from the team share how the dev coordination for the Rust migration was handled? I only see a single PR (#9512)—how was the work organized?

  • Post Author
    albertzeyer
    Posted February 27, 2025 at 1:29 pm

    > However, there should be no direct impact on users.

    I find this quite impressive, that they rewrote the whole Fish core, but everything keeps working exactly in the same way (except very few minor things which change in only minor ways, which they list).

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